Tucked away in a corner of the Shapiro Undergraduate Library, a bulky and unassuming machine whirrs to life. A few clicks of a mouse send the mini assembly line housed within into a frenzy while its Plexiglas exoskeleton provides observers a front-row seat to watch the carefully calibrated action.

Seven minutes later, the machine spits out an entire paperback book.

This isn’t a stack of stapled computer pages. It’s a retail-quality product glued and bound with a semi-gloss full-color cover that looks like it was just pulled from a nearby shelf. Still warm to the touch, the newly minted School of Social Work textbook waits to be joined by nine identical copies, which will soon find their way into the hands of University students, all for about $6 a pop.

While book lovers and e-reader fanatics everywhere enjoy pitting the established world of print media against the up-and-coming innovations of the digital age, student and faculty publishers at the University of Michigan have long been able to see the inherent fallacy within this hyped-up conflict.

As a seamless marriage of electronic convenience and physical utility, Shapiro’s Espresso Book Machine is a perfect symbol of the University’s ultimate vision: No matter the format, publishing should allow scholarly information to become a volume greater than the sum of its parts.

Print and beyond

The Espresso Book Machine is operated by MPublishing, which acts as the University’s primary academic publishing umbrella: It encompasses the University of Michigan Press, the Scholarly Publishing Office, Deep Blue (a faculty repository), the Copyright Office and the Text Creation Partnership.

The most recognizable entity of MPublishing is the University Press, which has more than 80 years of quality publishing experience under its belt.

Surprisingly, the majority of the work printed by university presses is for non-local faculty. Presses tend to focus on developing texts from only a few specific literary fields, drawing in authors who study within those academic disciplines from across the country. The University Press has historically specialized in areas such as political science, disability studies and ESL.

Though this field-specific focus is a traditional aspect of all university presses, the technological development of MPublishing’s services means specialization is giving way to a broad and inclusive publishing environment for a wide range of scholars.

“About five percent of our author pool is U of M faculty,” said Karen Hill, interim director and digital manager of the University Press. “But we’re not excluding them. One of our goals is to build that author pool and see if we can’t grow that number.”

English Prof. Tobin Siebers has published multiple textbooks with the University Press, many of which address disability studies. While his books have mainly appeared solely in print form, Siebers found that some forms of digital publishing, specifically electronic journals, complement his work well.

“This had to do specifically with illustrations,” Siebers said. “Because the cost of color illustrations is so large, it’s almost impossible to get good print quality. When you publish in online journals, they can publish the color illustrations very easily, and so you get a really good representation of your illustrations.”

While many faculty members continue to request print copies of their work, there is an undeniable sense that the world of information on paper is slowly finding a new niche within the publishing structure of the future. Even Siebers, most of whose works have been published in print, pointed out that research and sharing have become a digital process.

“The curious thing about this process is that most of the reading that I do, I actually do online,” Siebers said.